1. ¹Department of Economic and Management Sciences, Catholic University of Milan, Milan, Italy
2. ²Department of Social and Political Studies, State University of Milan, Milan, Italy

Correspondence: M Sorrentino, Department of Social and Political Studies, State University of Milan, Via Conservatorio 7, 20122 Milan, Italy. Tel: +39 02 50318841; Fax: +39 02 50318840; E-mail: maddalena.sorrentino@unimi.it

Abstract

This paper aims to highlight the relevance of a cultivation approach with the goal of exploring the concrete implications it may have for public administrations (PA) involved in projects of organisational change. We suggest that adopting an approach to change that reflects the cultivation perspective is an unavoidable choice for PA, much more so than it is for the corporate world. The claim is that public-sector organisations design and implement organisational solutions that find it hard to move away from the 'maintenance' logic of legacy systems. Compared with the rational perspective, which is geared entirely to establishing optimal relations between means and ends, the cultivation approach enables us to make valuable advances at the interpretive level. We argue that the value of the processual and incremental perspective can be useful in creating a more realistic and less illusory reconstruction of the relationship between technological change and organisational change. In this paper, we discuss how combining policy studies with ICT social studies can help empower the cultivation logic, originating new tools for analysing and evaluating e-government results.